President-elect Donald J. Trump recently appeared at a Carrier furnace factory in Indiana and explained why he was there, having worked out a deal to keep some of that company’s jobs from moving to Mexico.

It all happened because he saw something on television: himself.

“About a week ago, I was watching the nightly news,” he said. “I won’t say which one, because I don’t want to give them credit.” (It was NBC.) A Carrier worker had challenged Mr. Trump to keep his promise to stop the manufacturer from leaving the state.

This was news to Mr. Trump, who didn’t believe he had made the promise until the newscast showed video of him doing it. There it was, on TV. So here he was.

It was a striking admission. And it captured, in miniature, what it means to have a president-elect who is so thoroughly of, by and for television.

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In 2004, passers-by were greeted with a sign from Mr. Trump’s television show, “The Apprentice,” on Trump Tower.CreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press

Yes, the former host of “The Apprentice” is a TV performer. He is an instinctual TV producer, with a gut sense of what keeps the red camera light on. (He is also, by the way, still an executive producer of “The Celebrity Apprentice” on NBC, whose longstanding, icky entanglements involving Mr. Trump will now extend to the presidency of the man its news reporters will have to cover.)

But he’s also the ultimate TV viewer. Last year, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that he got his military advice by watching “the shows” — i.e., political talk shows. He scarcely reads, he sleeps a scant few hours a night and, by all reports, he watches TV constantly, preferring programs about himself. At this point, what isn’t?

So to understand Mr. Trump is to realize that he is not just a TV celebrity; he is, in a strange, meta way, a spectator of his own performance. For the next four years at least, we are living in a TV show that Mr. Trump is simultaneously starring in, consuming and live-tweeting.

His cabinet vetting has been as much “The Bachelor” as “The Apprentice,” complete with luxurious backdrops (Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s club in Bedminster, N.J.), public sniping among associates about the suitors and even a candlelit dinner, at Jean-Georges with the secretary of state hopeful Mitt Romney.

The whole process reflects Mr. Trump’s worldview, which was reality TV before reality TV even existed: to see life, even within a team, as gladiatorial combat. On “The Apprentice,” he relished letting candidates go crabs-in-a-barrel on each other in the boardroom. Now it was Newt Gingrich, an early supporter of Mr. Trump, calling Mr. Romney a potential “disaster” on Fox News.

But beyond a point, the presidency-as-reality-TV analogy breaks down. Reality shows have structure, cohesion. As a reality star, Mr. Trump had producers and editors to retrofit logic onto his decisions.

In an October feature in CineMontage, former “Apprentice” staffers recalled that Mr. Trump would often “fire” contestants for reasons having nothing to do with their performance. Jonathon Braun, a supervising editor, said, “Our first priority on every episode like that was to reverse-engineer the show to make it look like his judgment had some basis in reality.”

The most surreal symbol of the presidential transition has been an actual webcam: the C-Span live video feed from the brass-and-marble-sheathed elevator lobby of Trump Tower (which is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.).

Tourists and holiday shoppers gawk and gossip with the bored camera crew. Occasionally a big name drops by — Al Gore, Scott Brown — and the chatter builds. The Naked Cowboy, a street musician who’s lately taken to wearing Trump underpants, boards an elevator; Senator Heidi Heitkamp squeezes into the car with him.

It’s a window on the imperial capital as luxury mall, gilded, full of whispers and intrigue, subtle as a ton of brass.

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The street musician the Naked Cowboy in the Trump Tower lobby in Manhattan last month.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

Outside this 1980s-chic aquarium, cable news has become a dog pack chasing the brightly colored balls that Mr. Trump throws in every direction. He holds a greatest-hits-tour “thank you” rally and the news networks go wall to wall. On Twitter he attacks the cast of “Hamilton” and lobs a bogus charge that “millions” of people voted illegally, setting the agenda for the day’s news.

Critics of Mr. Trump have ascribed all manner of 3-D-chess cunning to his outbursts. He’s trying to distract us from his conflicts of interest, or he’s luring liberals into unwinnable culture fights, or he’s turning his Twitter feed into a state propaganda outlet.

Maybe. But even as Mr. Trump pushes the news cycle, he also seems to be pulled by it.

Look at how many of his Twitter outbursts, just since his election, have been about something on TV that made him mad. He’s slammed “Saturday Night Live,” again and again. (A tip: If Mr. Trump calls something “unwatchable”—“S.N.L.,” “Morning Joe,” CNN — it means he watches it obsessively.)

He suggested that flag burners should be stripped of their citizenship, shortly after a related Fox News segment ran. He retweeted supporters blasting a CNN reporter for questioning his baseless voting-fraud claims. He slammed a CNN report about his continuing role with “Celebrity Apprentice” — a tweet about a TV story about his TV career, perhaps the most Trumpian act imaginable.

Mr. Trump and cable news have the same metabolism. Cable news demands a steady stream of excitations and “breaking” updates, a constant instability that keeps you tuning in.

Mr. Trump is glad to supply that, and cable news is glad to respond. This creates a perpetual-motion machine. Mr. Trump sees something in the news; he gets mad; he tweets; that becomes the news; repeat. He’s the Hate-Watcher in Chief.

The last president with a history in entertainment, Ronald Reagan, came from the movies by way of the California governor’s mansion. He knew how to read a script and had already learned to marry politics to smooth stagecraft.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is all stream of consciousness, improv, roll the cameras and we’ll clean it up in postproduction. It’s unsteadying, disorienting. The national narrative becomes a reel of explosions and contradictions with no thread. Controversies follow one another too fast to remember any of them. Last week seems like a year ago.

This chaos may benefit only the president-elect because when there is no certainty, when there is no logic, there remains only the leader — only Mr. Trump.

Before Nov. 8, there was speculation that Mr. Trump would found a Trump TV channel after the election. It turned out a bit differently: This is what Trump TV is.